Hurt the Ones You Love
by Alara Rogers
Summary: Star Trek bookverse TNG novels, with a main character who was introduced in Voyager. The female Q has finally figured out how to make her Q as angry and jealous as he makes her -- she's going to have an affair with an M. Schmoopy f/f, m/f dubcon.


_Author's Note: My first story of the new decade, and it's an angsty piece of alien smut involving schmoopy f/f between beings that aren't really female and violent m/f dubcon between beings that aren't really male or female, with a screwed-up main character who is an excessively minor canon figure and a love interest who comes from the bookverse. I fully expect that exactly no one will read the damn thing. :-) This would be rated too high for fanfiction dot net if these people were humanoids or if their idea of sex bore any resemblance to human sex, but they're not and it doesn't so it gets an M-rating._

_The female Q (played by Suzy Plakson) comes from Voyager: "The Q and the Grey". She and the male Q (played by John de Lancie) are copyright Paramount Pictures. M was created by Peter David and John de Lancie in "I, Q", although the reason for her enmity with Q (which isn't exactly spelled out, but you can guess) is mine. References to 0 come from Greg Cox's "Q-Continuum" trilogy; references to the Heart of the Storm come from Peter David's "Q-Squared", though nothing else from that story is in my canon due to it being jossed by Voyager. The "other Q" is mine, and is referred to as Azi in most of the other fics she appears in._

_Alien sex is alien, and absolutely nothing about how it works or what aliens do with it should be interpreted to be saying something about human sex. (Human emotions, yes, but human sex DOES NOT WORK LIKE THIS, largely due to the fact that humans are not telepaths.) M is sweet (at this point in time, anyway) but the Q in this story are TOTALLY SCREWED UP. Dubcon, dark._

* * *

Hurt The Ones You Love

Q sings a love song for her lover M, as they float together, cradled in each other's energies, above a world near the galactic core. M laughs in delight, and provides her own harmony, the music of the spheres in her voice and her essence.

The M sing. (Their name is more accurately rendered as the Mmmmmmm; they name themselves for the subsonic harmonic, the hum of the universe, the mathematical description of the orbits of the galaxies around the universe's core and the suns around the center of their galaxies and the planets around the suns, as translated into music. If it were actually sound waves it would be far too deep for humans to hear, and sound waves cannot travel through space anyway, but the M make their music out of any sort of energy they like.) They live for their songs; they see their purpose in existence as preserving the harmony of the universe's song. (They also think they predate the Q, but Q knows better; in the eternal memories of the Q Continuum, the M are a very early offshoot, pioneering creators of the Q Continuum breaking off and forming their own Continuum, one closer to the universe of matter, near the dawn of time. The M say the Q are the offshoots and they are the originals, of course.) The Q don't sing; the concept of music is meaningless to them.

Except to this Q. She is a goddess of war, a proud creature who loves valor and bravery and glorious battle, although she's only ever been in one battle, herself. She loves rebels, tricksters, chaos-bringers, those that upset the apple cart of authority, even though she herself is usually a very respectable, law-abiding Q. But today she is with a gentle, loving, tender being, the opposite of everything she has ever loved in a Q, because this is an M and they don't play by the same rules. They love music, and secretly, she has always wanted to create music. So she sings for her lover, and revels in the tiny rebellion, that she is doing something so very unQlike as to sing, let alone something as unQlike as to make love to a non-Q.

At least the M is also a Power. Unlike _some_ Q she could mention, who debase themselves to dallying with mortals. Sexual acts with mortals can be entertaining, but _some_ Q she could mention actually stoop so low as to _care_ about them.

M melds her energies against Q's, caressing the other being, penetrating the outer edge of her corona only very slightly. "You sing beautifully," she whispers, even as her own song continues -- unlike mortals, they don't need to limit themselves to a single voice, a single channel of communication, at a time. "I've never heard a Q sing."

"I doubt you ever will again. It's not a highly valued talent in our Continuum."

"You should come to our Continuum." It seems possible, probably even easy, to switch from being Q to M or the other way around, since to the extent that energy beings have a biology, theirs is almost identical. No one has ever done it, so it might be that there would be unforeseen complications, but in theory, it should be simple to do. That doesn't mean Q is going to do it, but she lets M dream. "We would value all of your talents."

Q somehow doubts it. She doesn't think the M Continuum could handle absorbing the memories of some of the things she's done. Dismembering a Power bit by bit, for one thing. That won't go over so well among the M. "Show me how you value my talents," she says instead, her voice rough with desire, as she lets tendrils of her essence creep deeper into M. The other entity moans, and it becomes part of the song.

"No one has ever made me feel this way," M says, which Q suspects is romantic melodrama but it sounds sweet. Her own essence probes within Q's, searching for the nodes for energy exchange, the closest thing an M or a Q has to genitals.

In the beginning of time the Q designed themselves to share energy freely with one another. Since they knew they would have to be selfish and strong-willed to withstand the pressure of their Continuum, let alone the screaming heart of chaos at the center of the multiverse, they knew that Q would need a much better motive for giving up energy than for taking it, or else they'd just vampirize each other. So they designed themselves to derive their most exquisite pleasure from having another Q draw on their energy, through their power transfer nodes. The M share the same basic structure, the same design. Q sighs as she and M move through each other, and cries out as she feels M brush against the nodes, taut and pulsing with the raw energy of creation that is every Q's birthright to channel. She finds M's own nodes, making her lover's song change sharply in pitch, and then they are each sucking energy from the other one.

In human terms, the pleasure of drawing energy from another entity would be akin to eating really tasty ice cream; the pleasure of being drawn from is akin to receiving really good oral sex. Except, of course, that the sensations are thousands of times more intense and pleasurable than that. Q has done this literally billions of times, with other Q, but less than a dozen times with M, and every time she does it she's unbearably aroused at the thought that this is M energy she is drinking, at the slightly different taste of the energy and the slightly different feel of the essence inside and around her and the slightly different shape of the connecting tendrils that are pulling energy out of her. Physically (or what passes for physically among noncorporeal entities anyway), it would be good no matter who she did it with, but mentally the fact that she's doing it with an M excites her more than sex with any Q whatsoever, including her Q, has in a few million years. The being touching her is like her but alien, shaped like her but unknown; she hasn't been in the same Continuum with M, sharing memories and pleasures and experiencing conflicts, knowing her as well as she knows herself, for billions of years as she has with every Q in the Continuum. The novelty, the fact that she barely knows M, that they've been having this affair for less than a hundred thousand years, makes this incredible.

"Oh, Q," M gasps. "I want to be with you forever."

Forever is a very long time. Q's already figured out that no one stays with anyone forever. But the M still practice reproduction and this M is barely a billion years old, a baby in Q terms if it weren't for the fact that the lack of reproduction has been keeping the youngest cohort of the Q more immature than they really ought to be for several billion. She's mature enough to be Q's lover, but she's much more naive than Q, much more romantic.

Instead of trying to answer that, which would either involve lying or breaking the mood, Q swiftly envelops M, wrapping herself around the other entity and drawing them into each other as deeply as they'll go. It's possible for Q to merge fully and entirely with each other, and presumably the M can do the same with their own kind, but M and Q cannot fully conjoin; the slight incompatibility of their energies, the small difference in their wavelengths, keeps them from merging entirely into a single entity. That's all right, though. Q's Q -- she thinks of him that way, _her_ Q, though there's another Q who thinks the same, and really they all belong to the Continuum -- will not join completely and entirely with anyone but her, and in recognition of that she has an agreement with him not to join completely and entirely with anyone but him. Besides, this is all the intimacy she really wants from such a stranger; the idea of knowing M completely is attractive, but the idea of being completely known to M is less so, and reciprocity demands that she take only what she's willing to give.

They are still singing to one another. Unnoticed by either, their song, of love, life, togetherness, and new beginnings, has sparked a planet with nothing on it but irradiated microbes to burst into flower, life evolving at a fantastic pace, microbes becoming multi-celled organisms becoming sentient beings within the unheard-of space of ten thousand years. (It helps that the radiation is so intense at the galactic core.) The shamans of these beings go on vision quests and derive tiny, fragmentary perceptions of the entities' lovemaking, and return to tell their people that their world was created by the love two goddesses shared, built from nothing by the power of their love song. Later, centuries from now, atheists will pooh-pooh the entire concept because there will be no scientific evidence for it.

Sex between Q (or between M for that matter) does not build, and peak, and then die down. They can reach higher and higher plateaus of pleasure, but when they reach the point of as much pleasure as they can stand, as much as the entities involved are willing to experience, they stay there, remaining on that plateau for as long as they both desire it. They may let the intensity dip down, just to make an exciting contrast when they build it back up again, but it doesn't _have_ to decrease if they don't want it to. In human terms it would be equivalent to having an orgasm that lasts for hours until the human doesn't feel like having an orgasm anymore.

It is ten thousand years before Q feels like pulling free of M's embrace. She stops singing, and withdraws from the other entity. M lets her pull apart so they are no longer overlapping each other, but holds tight so Q cannot actually separate their coronas, their outermost edges, from each other. "Stay with me a little while?"

"I need to go back to my Continuum. A mortal lifetime or two is one thing, but they'll have missed me for being gone _this_ long." They know where she is; during her millennia of ecstasy with M she felt them pinging her, checking up on her... which is exactly how she wanted it. But it won't do to tell M that.

"I know, I know. My Continuum will probably complain as well." M smiles. "But I don't really care. I love you, Q. Nothing will keep me apart from you, not even if the Continuum wants to lecture me for _years_." She means her own Continuum, the M Continuum. Q knows her Continuum, the Q Continuum, is capable of handing out worse punishments than a lengthy lecture.

No one has ever admitted to loving her before.

She suddenly can't bear to be here with M. She begins to feel guilty for leading the other entity on, for letting M fall in love with her. M is so sweet, so gentle. She doesn't want to think what M might become if she learns how Q really feels about her. Because she _likes_ M, no question, and she enjoys her company, and the sex is the best she's had in ages... but she started this whole thing just to make her Q jealous, and she thinks it might be finally working.

* * *

She's back in her own Continuum for mere moments before her Q shows up.

"Shacking up with an _M_, Q?" He's trying to sound supercilious, sneering and disdainful, but there's too much raw anger and hurt in him. "Really, you couldn't have done better than that?"

"What is it to you?" she fires off. "You're the one who's always telling me I have no claim on your time, or what you do with your lovers. It's a trifle late to show up and tell me _you're_ jealous."

"Jealous? Hardly," he says, without even making a token attempt to conceal from her that it's a lie. "I just think it's insulting. If you'll stoop to fucking an M, what does that say about your taste in lovers? And what does _that_ say about _me?_"

"Of course, it's all about you," she says. "When you fall in love with _mortals_, what does that say about _me?_ I'm so inadequate you need to turn to something made of meat, something infinitesimal and finite, to supply what you need?"

"Mortals die!" he snarls at her. "I've _never_ had a mortal longer than a couple of thousand years, tops, and it's usually more like a century. You were having sex with M for _ten thousand years!_ You don't see that that's completely different?" He's diffused himself to surround her, cutting off any avenue of escape, and while he can't pre-emptively block teleportation, he could follow her anywhere she chose to go. That's all right, though. She wants him to follow.

Q creates a pocket dimension and steps into it sideways, and her Q follows. "Must you demonstrate your hypocrisy to the entire Continuum?" she asks. "If you're going to complain that I did to you what you do to me all the time, do it in private."

He slams her back against the boundaries of her pocket reality, pinning her in place, surrounding her in every dimension she's made available in this place. "It. Is. _Different,_" he shouts, trying and failing to reign in his overtones of rage. "Everyone knows mortals can't compete with a Q. You're the only one who thinks that my dalliances with mortals reflects badly on you; everyone else knows I just turn to them for a bit of spice and unpredictability. But you! You're involved with an _M_! Did you fail to remember the _war_ with them? Did you forget they're our rivals? What are you doing cozying up to the opposition?"

"I know a lot more about war than you do," she snaps. "The thing we had with the M was over billions of years ago. You and I had barely been created then. We were still children. And it was for an incredibly stupid reason, and I _know_ you think it was an incredibly stupid reason because you've told me so, many times. So why should I consider it relevant now?"

"Because!" Because an M is an actual threat to our relationship, she hears, in the part of his thoughtspeech he does not foreground. "Because she's not one of us and she's not _not_ one of us. Because if you need to go outside the Continuum for a Being of Power to be your lover, it makes us _all_ look bad." Because you say I'm yours, I'm yours, you complain about it all the time when I'm with mortals, you only want to share me with other Q and that's only because we'll all laugh at you if you don't, but what, you think I'm yours but you're not mine? You want to put restrictions on my behavior but fuck anyone you like? It doesn't work like that. "Because she's an M!"

His rage, his pain and hurt, pulses from him. He's surrounding her everywhere, touching her as if he intends to absorb her or join with her, and the anger he feels oozes from his outer surface. She can feel it against her like a spicy burn. Like the anger she holds inside, and paradoxically, feeling his against her soothes the burning she feels deep within. He hurts now like he makes her hurt. Good. But she wants more. She wants to make him lose his temper and self-control completely. And he's her Q, he's a chaotic, rebellious, impulsive aspect of the Continuum and it's not that hard to make him enraged.

"Maybe if you weren't so inadequate I wouldn't _have_ to go fuck an M. You know she was the best I've ever had, right? You don't even begin to compare."

She feels the rage swamp his ability to think, drowning reason, conscience, forethought, and then he is inside her and around her, compressing her within his essence and invading her from every direction. In the same movement, he has latched into her power nodes and is draining her, drinking from her, pulling her energy into himself while he pins her into her own surface so she can't reach for his nodes.

Pleasure and pain are completely separate sensations for the Q -- they don't, typically, synergize together -- but the fact that _he_ is hurting her, dominating her, the cruel satisfaction and vengeful joy she feels him feel as he feels her pain, is a dark delight she finds arousing even as it hurts, and that intensifies the pleasure as he sucks energy from her. He wants her to suffer the way she wants him to suffer. He wants her pain because she's hurt him, the way she wants his pain because he hurts her all the time. He's _jealous_, an emotion he claims he's above and that all Q should be above and that he mocks her all the time for feeling. And she's never been able to bring herself to really, really hurt him, not physically, the way she wants to, because she's a respectable Q and she's too controlled and her inhibitions against harming another Q are too strong, but his inhibitions have always been paper-thin and she's just shredded them. He's doing to her what she wanted and couldn't make herself do to him, and in this moment of joining they are almost the same entity.

She fights back, because it's no good if she doesn't -- it's hardly a victory for him if she surrenders without a fight, and if it's not a victory for him then how can she know how badly he wants it? Q powers respond to the strength of desire. He has to want to hurt her, to force her, more than she wants to get free. Which isn't difficult to manage, because she doesn't want to get free, but she needs to put up a show of it or she won't know how hard he'd fight to control her. So she fights back, viciously, with all the strength she can muster up, but since she doesn't really want to get free and he wants very much to pin her down, she knows she won't succeed. Also, because he's draining her energy. It feels amazing but it's making her weaker, because he won't let her tap into him and drain him back. It doesn't matter. She's in the Continuum; energy's all around them. Sooner or later he'll take enough that his energy will start flowing back into her, without his control, because the pressure of the energy levels need to equalize between them and he won't be strong enough to hold the flow back. She's not in any danger.

But she doesn't think her Q knows that. And that excites her, too. He's so overwhelmed by the anger and pain she's made him feel that he's completely out of control, actually attempting to cause serious harm to her -- to another Q. If she thought he _could_ actually hurt her, that might frighten her, but since it's axiomatic that one Q can't harm another outside of absorbing each other, and since her Q has never actually absorbed or been willing to absorb anyone, she knows it's safe, and she's free to find it enthralling. He's suffering as badly as he made her suffer, feeling as much jealous fury and vengefulness as he makes her feel... and that means he cares about her as much as she does for him.

She feels his rage beating at her, and his grief, insecurity and feelings of inadequacy and shame, and the thoughts and fears of his that fuel such feelings. He's tainted. He's been for millennia, since 0. He has dark feelings and sadistic impulses he tries to keep out of the Continuum totality, but they all know they're there and they all look down on him. He goes to mortals because they don't look _down_ on him -- they may hate and fear him, but they don't consider him inferior, lesser than them. He knows that even though Q said she accepted him despite the taint, she's influenced by her peers as all in the Continuum are, and he turns to mortals instead of her because he thinks she looks down on him, and if she's making love to an M instead of him it proves his fears to be true, and he has to hurt her for that. Has to make her suffer as he suffers. It's far from a full joining; he's completely in control of it, compacting her inside him so she can't diffuse her substance into him or even touch him outside the boundaries of herself, but he's diffused himself all throughout her, inside her everywhere, touching her everywhere within and without. All Q are equals in strength; it's only his rage (and the fact that she actually wants this) that allows him to overpower her like this.

The joining is pain and pleasure at the same time, the stress of being compacted and the sweetness of mouths on her power nodes drinking her energy and the swooning feeling of weakness as her energy depletes, the pleasure of joining and the pain of another Q inside her substance when she's been compressed, and through it all she feels his rage burning, pulsing through her like fire. It overwhelms her. Q minds are so large and their consciousness so wide, it is very, very difficult for there to be enough sensation to overwhelm a Q, but this is doing it. She cries out in abandon, losing herself, becoming him and he's punishing her and he is her and she is him so she's punishing him and...

He draws away, sharply, still afraid of complete joinings. Her Q has never wanted to lose himself completely in another Q, or let another Q lose themselves in him; he wants to be himself, as unique and solitary unto himself as a Q can be. The moment in which they were, briefly, the same entity frightens him, and the fear breaks through the rage and the feelings of pleasure, and he pulls away so quickly it's painful for both of them.

For a moment, self-collected and entirely outside her, not even touching her, he stares at her, his aura flaring with so many emotions that it's essentially unreadable.

And then he does the Q equivalent of bursting into tears.

"Don't _ever_ do that to me again," he begs, pulling her to himself in more of an embrace for comfort than any kind of violence, and she feels his guilt. That, too, satisfies her. "Don't make me do something like that to you again."

"Take some responsibility for yourself," she says sharply, but she doesn't push him away. "I couldn't possibly make you do anything you didn't want to do."

"You _made_ me want to. You deliberately provoked me into attacking you!"

"Oh, and your continual dalliances with mortals isn't supposed to provoke _me_ at all?"

"That's not about you! I don't do that because I'm _trying_ to hurt you, Q--"

"No, you just don't care if you hurt me. I think that's worse. At least if I go out of my way to torment you and provoke you into violence, you know I care what you think."

"Just... don't," he says. It is a plea. "I don't -- I never want to want to hurt you."

"And yet you did."

"But you weren't actually _hurt._ You were orchestrating the whole thing. I saw it in your mind when we were joined. You wanted me to do everything I did."

"Yes, but when you did it, you didn't know that," she says sweetly, cruelly. "You just tried to rape me, Q."

He is miserable, horrified at himself because the fact that she _could_ provoke him into trying such a thing is proof of the taint within him, the thing the Continuum despises him for, the thing he despises himself for. So he's defensive and furious, even though he's still clinging to her. "Can't rape the willing, sweetheart. No matter what I tried, it wouldn't have worked if you hadn't wanted it, and you know that. Why did you want me to hurt you, anyway? Did you feel guilty over dirtying yourself with an M, after all?"

She's not sure whether he genuinely hasn't allowed himself to grasp her reasons, or whether he's just firing shots at random to make himself feel better -- he was in her mind. He knows exactly why she did it, if he is willing to accept it enough to admit it to himself. "I felt guilty," she says softly, whispering to him, "about the fact that I wanted to do that to _you_. That every time I see you obsessed with some mortal, cooing over your little pets, saving their pathetic short lives from the consequences of their own stupidity, seducing them because you want them to love you... I want to hurt you. I want to crush you, rip you up, throw you up against the boundaries of reality and fuck you so hard you can't think about anyone but me for the next billion years. But _I'm_ a better Q than that, so _I_ can't do it."

Her words sink in like a brutal slap, burning and stinging him, and she sees and feels him react. She's saying she's a better Q than _him_, that she was able to provoke him to the violence she wants to commit on him because he's a tainted, corrupted Q, altered forever by the mentor he unwisely chose. It's what he most fears, and what he most fears _her_ believing, and he's just proven it true.

He lets go of her. "You want to pretend this is all about the mortals, fine," he whispers hoarsely. "But I don't think you're that stupid. You can't sincerely think something with the lifespan of a mayfly threatens you; you're not that insecure." He leans close to her again. "I think you're jealous of Q," he says softly, and vanishes.

And that's a slap to _her_ face, because it's true.

No Q should ever be jealous of another Q. No Q is even supposed to care about an individual other Q more than they care about the totality of the Continuum, but no one pays attention to that rule and it's completely unenforceable anyway. But, at the very least, no Q may own another Q, or lay a claim to them that supersedes the rights of other Q to them. The Q Continuum holds together by the joinings of its members -- every Q must share every other Q with every other Q. She has no right to be jealous of the other Q that her Q loves.

But she is.

She displaces it onto mortals because if she admitted the truth she'd be a laughingstock, a pathetic figure of fun. He was involved with Q before he was ever involved with her -- _she_, the other Q, has a superior claim on him. And she's a black hole of emotional need, a broken thing craving so much intimacy and love that she's barely functional in the Continuum. Now _she_ could be an M, maybe. Because the M are loving and gentle and harmonious because all they have to do is maintain the matter universe in balance... but the Q live next door to the Heart of the Storm and they must be violent, they must be selfish, they must maintain their own individualities against the pressure of their overmind or their overmind will never have the strength to master chaos and hold the line against it.

The other Q her Q loves was born in the wrong Continuum, and billions of years of needing more love and closeness than any other Q dares to give her have warped her. She's demanding, violent, unstable, needy. He thinks his role in life is to protect her from herself, so he gives her what he can and chases other Q who'd risk her individual existence to give her more of what she craves away from her, and she treats him like a mean, jealous person arbitrarily standing between her and what she wants rather than someone who is acting to save her individuality. _He_ has always been looked down on by the Continuum, even before 0, has been cut less slack and taken less seriously than even other trickster figures with similar personalities, because he's allowed the Continuum to perceive _him_ as jealous and possessive of another Q in his efforts to protect the one he loves, and it's made _him_ a laughingstock.

Q hates the other Q. She hates her because the other Q is cruel to her Q, who is only trying to protect her, and because every time the other Q draws her Q into her personal drama, it sucks all the energy out of him and he has nothing to give to _her_, and because her Q loves the other Q and fights to protect her and she has never been entirely sure he would do the same for her. Not that she needs the same, because she's not a broken, dysfunctional, overly needy excuse for a Q, but if she did need it, she doesn't know if he would give it to her.

Her Q loves the other Q more than he loves her. She didn't used to care about the mortals, but they're a convenient scapegoat for the jealousy she truly feels, the hatred and envy of a fellow Q that she's not allowed to feel.

And that's why she took up with an M. Because he's right -- a mortal is no competition for a Q, so an affair with an M is a response completely out of proportion to his passion for his mortal pets. But an affair with an M is a perfectly reasonable response to the fact that he loves another Q more than he loves her. There's nothing she can do to hurt her rival or even admit that the other Q _is_ her rival. All she can do is hurt _him_ for loving that Q more than her.

And now, he knows why.

Or rather... he's always known why, because he's the only Q she's joined with fully, the only Q who knows her completely inside and out. But now, he's willing to _voice_ it. And if he is willing to articulate her secret, the one she herself has never spoken, it's only a matter of time before the rest of the Continuum finds out, and she becomes as much of a laughingstock as he is.

She's shaking with fury, with the aftermath of the violent sex and the argument, and the fear that he'll tell her secrets to the Continuum. If any Q can keep a secret it's him, since his shields are always on full and he only ever fully joins with her (once or twice with the other Q, but she needs it too much and she wants to lose herself so badly, he's even more frightened of fully joining with her than he is with random other Q -- he tells Q that every time it's happened it was the other Q forcing the issue while they were already so intimately involved that he was too overwhelmed to recognize the danger in time and stop her, and she believes him.) But he may be so angry at her that he chooses not to keep her secret.

Of course, if the rest of the Q think he's motivated by jealousy himself, they won't take him seriously. She could go to him and plead with him to keep her secret... or she could do something to undercut his position, so if he does tell any other Q they simply won't believe him. And there's only one thing she can think of to do.

They'll accept him being jealous of an M, because it's an _M_. The rivalry between the M and the Q goes back billions of years. But they won't accept him being jealous of another Q any more than they'll accept it from her, and they'll believe it true of him more easily. He's the tainted one. He's the one who's infamous for trying to keep his other lover away from other Q.

So she needs to seduce her rival. If she tries to join fully with the other Q, he'll see that as a threat to the other Q's existence -- particularly since he knows about the jealousy Q feels and the ill will she feels toward the other Q, he might jump to the conclusion that she is trying to absorb her rival. He'll interfere, and then she can mock him publicly for his jealous antics, and nothing he says about _her_ being jealous after that will be particularly believable. Of course, she can't _actually_ fully join with her rival, or the other Q will also know the truth and have even less motive not to share it with everyone, but her Q doesn't need to know that.

For a moment she thinks wistfully of M, whose love is completely uncomplicated, untainted by all this jockeying for status and need to stay separate and feelings of pain and rage toward the ones she loves. She would rather be going and seducing M again than touching the one Q she hates. But she has to protect her status in the Continuum, which means discrediting the Q she loves, which means fucking the Q _he_ loves. And deep down inside she wishes she could just go to him and beg his forgiveness, forgive him for what he's done if he'll keep her true reasons for jealousy to himself, but if she does that he'll think he can continue to walk all over her and never suffer any consequences.

Oh, well. Rumor has it the other Q is amazing in bed. Q hasn't been with her in billions of years, outside of a large group orgy of twenty or more Q at the same time, so she wouldn't know for herself if the rumor is true or not, but if it is it might make this whole stunt marginally bearable.

She locates the other Q with her mind, and vanishes.


End file.
